Gangsters come in many forms, from criminals who obey only the laws of the underworld to rulers who impose their own laws. What gangsterism—criminal or governmental—has in common is a code of behavior that pays lip service to social conventions and mores but violates them at will, and similarly pretends to respect women but in fact degrades them by reducing them to sexual objects.
Yet some women are attracted to the gangster’s raw power and insolent disregard for the law, to the unearned privileges and wealth that usually accompany them, to the thrill of achieving intimacy with such larger-than-life men. Such women may become gangsters’ mistresses and attempt to play out their fantasies in flesh-and-blood real life.
Perhaps the most famous gangster’s moll was Virginia Hill, mistress to Bugsy Siegel, a highly ranked member of the American Jewish Mafia and best known as the man who introduced big-time gambling casinos to Las Vegas. Virginia Hill inspired decades of young moll wannabes to emulate her tough and—to them—glamorous lifestyle. Hollywood, too, succumbed to Virginia’s charms in Bugsy, a 1991 blockbuster about Bugsy’s catastrophic (but prescient) endeavors to transform the poky town of Las Vegas into a giant gaming and entertainment oasis in the Nevada desert. His turbulent relationship with Virginia was integral to this story.
The real-life Virginia was a sort of twisted Horatio Alger. She was born in 1916 in small-town Alabama, the seventh of ten children whose savagely alcoholic father beat them and drank up most of his earnings. Virginia, nicknamed “Tab” for her cowering, tabby-cat-like demeanor, took the brunt of her father’s abuse. But when she was just seven, she rebelled. As her “drunken fucking bum” of a father staggered toward her to attack, she grabbed a skillet and smashed him with it. He retaliated by thrashing her mother, but never again laid a hand on Virginia.
Virginia’s mother finally left her husband and took Virginia out of school in grade eight to help her. Virginia held various low-paid jobs, did housework and cared for her younger siblings. Before long, she concluded that selling sex would be a much easier and more lucrative way of earning money. By fourteen, Tab had matured into a confidently sexy and sexually experienced bombshell who chafed at the constraints of life in Depression- and Prohibition-era Alabama and yearned for the glamor of the big city.
She rejected New York, teeming with immigrants and street gangs. Chicago, with its job openings at the Century of Progress International Exhibition (1933–4), seemed friendlier. But what mostly attracted Virginia were the immense possibilities for a stunning woman in the gangster world of Al Capone. Capone had been catapulted into notoriety by the Saint Valentine’s Day massacre of 1929, which put him squarely in control of Chicago’s underworld.
Seventeen-year-old Virginia arrived in Chicago seeking excitement, money and an easy life. Her father’s brutality had hardened her and convinced her that men were untrustworthy, an attitude that armed her for life as a moll.
Virginia’s first job in Chicago was waiting tables at the San Carlo Italian Village, a Capone-built complex of expensive restaurants patronized by gangsters. Before a year elapsed she had caught the attention of Joey “Ep” Epstein, who controlled Chicago’s racetrack betting. She was very pretty, five foot four inches of voluptuousness with long, thick auburn hair and penetrating gray eyes. Though she wore too much makeup, Epstein admired her self-composure and confidence. So did Mimi Capone, Al’s sister-in-law; she befriended Virginia and invited her to parties.
After an all-night mob party on June 12, 1934, Epstein initiated Virginia into his money-laundering operations as a courier and confidante. He instructed her in the intricacies of keeping records and dealing with the Internal Revenue Service. He explained the life-and-death etiquette of gangster society, bought her couturier clothing and set her up in an elegant apartment with a three-thousand-dollar weekly allowance. He financed her lavish parties that attracted wealthy Chicagoites on both sides of the law, and he encouraged her to sleep with other gangsters. He did not have sex with her himself. Epstein was likely a closeted homosexual, and having Virginia as his principal moll gave him considerable status and discouraged gossip about his sexuality.
From her vantage point as Epstein’s lieutenant, Virginia observed how other Mafia women were treated, and dismissed them as “dumb fucking dolls.” Their husbands often abused and beat them and displayed their mistresses like one more bauble. “I grew up with that crap from my father and got away from it,” she told a friend of Epstein’s. “Why would I put myself back into it now? Especially when I don’t have to?”2 Nineteen-year-old Virginia Hill would only indulge in sexual affairs as a matter of convenience, never for love.
By her twentieth birthday, Virginia was the intimate of Chicago’s most powerful racketeers, and had enough detailed information about their schemes and assassinations to destroy them. She knew, however, that the price of disclosure would be summary execution, and she never talked.
Virginia’s reputation for discretion did not, however, extend to sex, which she engaged in with a legion of mobsters. At one infamous Christmas party, she declared that she would put her mouth where the money was and crawled on her knees from man to man, unzipping their trousers and performing fellatio. When one disgusted woman called her a whore, Virginia grabbed her hair, slapped her face and shouted, “I’m the best damn cocksucker in Chicago, and I got the diamonds to prove it. I ain’t doing nothing that you haven’t done and I don’t see any diamonds on you.”3 This incident earned her the title of “Queen of the [Chicago] Mob,” and elicited even more respect for her toughness.
Virginia’s next conquest was Joey Adonis, a vicious New York mobster who controlled gambling and the numbers racket on the east coast. With the blessing of her Chicago associates, who were negotiating for an alliance with the New York Mafia, she moved to New York and soon became “Joey’s girl.” Virginia and Joey did everything together, including sex and crime. They quarreled ferociously and made enormous sums of money.
One night in a bar with Adonis, Virginia met Bugsy Siegel, who decided to seduce her as a way of insulting Adonis, whom he despised. Bugsy, another senior gangster, was as handsome as Virginia was beautiful, blue-eyed, dimpled and sleek-haired. Though he was vain and self-absorbed, Bugsy could be charming and was known to be loyal to his friends and allies. He also had a hair-trigger temper and was abusive to his molls and his underworld rivals. Only his wife and childhood sweetheart, Esta Krakower, never felt his fists.
Bugsy Siegel was the first man to dent the sheath protecting Virginia’s heart. A day after they met, they spent the night making love and Virginia responded to him with her heart as well as her body. But a few days later, Bugsy was sent to Hollywood to centralize the various gambling operations on the west coast.
Virginia was left alone, and Epstein punished her for her unauthorized and unwelcome affair with Siegel by reducing her allowance and responsibilities. Virginia was furious. Before long, she retreated back to her mother’s home in Georgia. This was not the hovel she had fled five years earlier. This was an imposing house purchased with the money she regularly sent her mother from up north.
Virginia rested, reconciled with Epstein, treated her mother to the finest home furnishings, clothes, fine restaurants, meals and jewelry. Then she and her younger brother, Chick, headed to Mexico for a last wild fling before returning to Chicago. Mexicans attracted and fascinated her, and her sexual appetite for them seemed insatiable.
Virginia and Chick returned to Chicago and the rackets. Then, on a brief holiday home, Virginia impetuously married Osgood Griffin, a nineteen-year-old University of Alabama football player. Six months later, during which time Virginia constantly left her husband behind on her frequent “business” trips to Chicago, California and Mexico, the marriage was annulled.
Virginia next married Miguelito Carlos Gonzales Valdez, a Mexican nightclub owner, so he could emigrate to the United States. Valdez, apparently unaware of her profession, expected her to be wifely and domestic. Virginia grew to despise him, and before long, they too divorced.
By her mid-twenties, Virginia had established herself as the mob’s most powerful and trusted female member, with easy access to Chicago, New York and Los Angeles leaders. She was as influential in the power structure as many male gangsters, and no other mob woman has ever achieved such raw power.
This was her status in the spring of 1939 when she and Bugsy Siegel reconnected at a party at actor George Raft’s mansion. Virginia took the initiative, and she and Bugsy spent the rest of the weekend in bed. From then on, the two were as thick as the thieves they were, merging sex and business, mingling with movie stars—Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Cary Grant—eager to associate with the glamorous and risqué couple with apparently inexhaustible funds.
In fact, Bugsy was so impossibly extravagant that he was always broke. Before Virginia, his molls had had to pay their own way and often his as well. But she was different and special, the great love of his life. Bugsy bought and renovated an elegant house and gave Virginia one of two gold keys to it. Even in immoderate, larger-than-life Tinseltown, Virginia and Bugsy threw around more money than anyone else in tips and gifts, and on themselves. Their house was exquisitely furnished. Their wardrobes were stunning—Virginia’s included over one hundred pairs of shoes, designer gowns, cashmere sweaters and a dozen furs. She always drove a new Cadillac. And she spared hundreds of dollars a month to support her mother.
Despite their closeness, Virginia and “Baby Blue Eyes”—an endearment she loved because he hated it—cheated on each other. Virginia could not resist Mexican boyfriends, old lovers and even George Raft, their mutual friend. Bugsy vowed to kill any man she slept with, but never managed to catch her in the act. Surprisingly, neither did the omnipresent reporters, though they trailed her everywhere and filed breathless stories about Bugsy Siegel’s gangster moll.
For five turbulent years, Virginia was Bugsy’s moll. They had the most satisfying sex Virginia had ever enjoyed. They fought, and when Bugsy battered her as her father had, Virginia pounded him back. Then she concealed her wounds with heavy makeup, and Bugsy did the same. But his terrifying temper, his jealousy and (justified) suspicions, his endless demands for money he never repaid and his refusal to divorce his wife and marry her slowly eroded Virginia’s commitment.
After one vicious battle over his refusal to divorce Esta, Bugsy beat Virginia into unconsciousness, threw her down on their bed and raped her. A while later, he invited her to move with him to Las Vegas. He had corrupted the authorities there and planned to construct a luxury hotel and casino called the Flamingo, his pet name for her. Virginia, who said she could never forgive him for raping her, laughed and flew back to New York, where she resumed an intense sexual relationship with Joey Adonis. She also gave detailed reports about Bugsy’s activities to rival mob leaders.
Bugsy persisted in wooing her. Virginia seldom visited Las Vegas, but they met when she was in Los Angeles, where he would regale her with stories about the increasingly out-of-control construction, its soaring costs and his own thefts (about two million dollars) from the money other gangsters had invested in it. Virginia made copious notes of every detail and reported them to Bugsy’s worried gangster colleagues.
The Flamingo’s opening night was disastrous. Weeks earlier, Virginia had moved in because she saw the hotel as a monument to her. She and Bugsy drank heavily and quarreled violently. Afterward, she withdrew completely from Las Vegas and the Flamingo, and reacted with rage at the mention of either. During a tryst with Bugsy in Los Angeles, she cursed him as a “two-bit loser, a fucking chump who made his friends rich but couldn’t keep cab fare in his own pocket.”4 In retaliation, Bugsy again beat and raped her.
Meanwhile, though the Flamingo was slowly becoming profitable, Bugsy’s associates considered him too unreliable and, in May 1947, decided to eliminate him. Despite Virginia’s cooperation with them, she was still closely linked to Bugsy and she often seemed unstable, swallowing sleeping pills in apparent suicide bids. As a result, Bugsy’s killers came close to ordering her extermination as well. Only Joey Adonis’s intervention saved her.
In mid-June, Epstein phoned Virginia and instructed her to leave Los Angeles. On June 20, days after her departure, as Bugsy Siegel lounged on the chesterfield reading the Los Angeles Times, his Mafia “friends” shot him to death. “The insect was killed,” Joey Adonis reported back in New York.5
From Paris, where she had taken up with a wealthy twenty-one-year-old Frenchman, Virginia granted an interview to the Times. “Ben, that’s what I always called him, was so nice,” she wept. “I can’t imagine who shot him or why.”6 Soon after, she swallowed another overdose of sleeping pills and was hospitalized.
After returning to the United States, a traumatized Virginia hid out with her brother in Florida, trying to evade reporters seeking to link her with Bugsy’s murder. Once again she attempted suicide, the fourth time in four months. As her depression intensified, so did her drinking, her rages and her instability. Joey Epstein, fearful about her diary, with its sensational secrets about the mob, continued to support her.
In February 1950, Virginia fell in love with and married Austrian ski instructor Hans Hauser, a suspected Nazi sympathizer. Nine months later their son Peter was born. In 1951, she was summoned to testify before the Kefauver Commission on organized crime. She appeared because she had to, but she lied and misled her interrogators, denying that she had ever been involved in organized crime. She protected Joey Epstein and attributed her impressive resources to the gifts of generous boyfriends.
Virginia did not escape scot-free. The Department of the Treasury came after her for tax evasion, forcing her to sell her house, furniture, what jewelry she hadn’t smuggled to a friend in Mexico and her clothes, including 144 pairs of shoes. Afterward, she traveled to Mexico on an Austrian passport and vowed never to return to the United States “to be persecuted by those rats in Washington. They are the real gangsters in this world, and it is not in my heart to forgive those who have hurt me.”7
The “rats in Washington” did not leave her alone. In 1954, when she was living in Europe with Hauser, Virginia was indicted for evading $80,180 in back income taxes. Wanted posters for her were posted everywhere, and even in Europe she was ostracized.
Over the years, Virginia’s condition deteriorated. She separated from Hauser and moved with their son, Peter, to a humble rooming house in Salzburg. Reflecting on her former life as a mob mistress, she said bitterly to Dean Jennings, who wrote about Bugsy Siegel, “I know hundreds of women in America who were kept by men. Why don’t they pay taxes? If they’re going to put me in jail for that why don’t they put the rest of them?”8
By 1966, poor and miserable in Europe, supported by her fifteen-year-old son, Peter, Virginia tried to negotiate an arrangement to return home and face judicial leniency. She also demanded money from her old gangster associates, threatening that unless they gave it to her she would hand over her incriminating notes about them to the authorities.
Virginia’s last days were spent in Naples, where she had gone to pressure Joey Adonis into giving her another large sum of money. Adonis claimed afterward that he acceded to her suggestion that they have sex, and that they spent all night making love. After they breakfasted together, he handed her ten thousand dollars in American one-hundred-dollar bills and kissed her goodbye. The next day two horrified hikers found Virginia’s corpse. Local police reported that she had overdosed on poison and had left a suicide note.
In recent years, a biography of Virginia Hill has disputed the apparent facts of her death. Andy Edmonds, who interviewed extensively for his biography, theorizes that she was murdered by two of Adonis’s cronies, and that back in New York, Joey Epstein knew about it as well. Her assassins drove her to a rural footpath, forced sleeping pills down her throat and left her unconscious, soon to die. The mob had conspired to get rid of their once mighty moll.
Virginia Hill was too notorious to die in obscurity. Her death titillated the media and the general public, who remembered her as she had once been, glamorous and gorgeously garbed, tough talking and irreverent, a sexual powerhouse and an endless font of cash. Mostly, they recalled how powerful she had been in the savage and dangerous world of the Mafia.
All these memories were accurate, in particular Virginia’s unique position as the trusted confidante and colleague of some of America’s most vicious and unforgiving criminals. In many ways, she had clawed out a form of independence and cushioned herself in a decadent lifestyle. But her independence was conditional on Joey Epstein and other Mafia bosses, so much so that disobedience could mean death. Virginia understood this and rebelled only on minor issues. She was killed when she forgot and tried to threaten her old colleagues and lovers.
For most of her life, Virginia’s happiness at her success alternated with misery, and she tried countless times to commit suicide, or at least to signal her deep distress. She suffered terrible depressions, and it is difficult to see how anyone who lived as precariously as she did could have felt otherwise. Virginia Hill’s glamorous and exciting lifestyle was, in fact, little more than a facade.
In later life, Virginia harbored a bitter grudge against Epstein, whom she blamed for introducing her to a life of crime in the first place. Mostly, however, she was furious that he had not advised her correctly about how much tax to pay, a banal plaint from a woman famed for her independence.
Virginia died in poverty, sold out by an old lover she had never loved and probably murdered on the orders of old friends and allies. Such was the woman who inspired so many other young women to seek their fortunes as molls in the criminal underworld.
Arlyne Weiss was born in 1934 in New York’s Lower East Side, and she grew up devouring newspaper stories about the exploits of Virginia Hill, whom one paper dubbed “the most successful woman in America.”10 Arlyne’s father was a well-connected racketeer who tried to steer her away from the underworld. But from the age of twelve, Arlyne was determined to be a mob girl like Virginia Hill.
Arlyne’s grandmother Ida Blum, who owned a funeral parlor, encouraged this ambition. Arlyne knew what was required: good looks, the brains to keep her mouth shut and the lovemaking skills to keep her special “wiseguy” sexually engaged. The payoff would be gifts, status and respect.
Arlyne matured into a tall, slender young woman with a generous bust. She lost her virginity to a young cousin, secretly and painfully, in her grandmother’s funeral parlor. After that she sought out older men to see if sex with them was more agreeable. In the evenings, she and three girlfriends cruised around in a car, picking up likely men.
What little reading Arlyne did was about Virginia Hill. “In my eyes,” she told her biographer, Teresa Carpenter, “here was a broad that really made it good.” Virginia’s most impressive accomplishment, Arlyne believed, was being accepted as one of the boys.
Though Arlyne was Jewish, she preferred Italian mobsters, whom she found more romantic and thrilling. Her first wiseguy was Tony Mirra, an enforcer for the Bonanno crime family. For several discouraging weeks, Tony ignored her. Finally he invited her for a car ride in his black Cadillac with the yellow doors, ran his hands over her thighs and breasts, then pushed her face onto his unzipped crotch. When she resisted, he said accusingly, “You’re nuthin’ but a cockteaser.” With that challenge, Arlyne slid her mouth over his penis and learned how to perform oral sex.
Fourteen-year-old Arlyne became Tony’s moll. He gave her money and she couriered envelopes and packages to his associates. Whenever she was “on duty” she dressed elaborately and draped herself in a Virginia Hill–like fox stole. Tony’s undesirability to her parents made him even more desirable to Arlyne, who stymied all their efforts to keep her away from him and from other equally disreputable mobsters.
After Tony came Italian fighter Al Pennino, whom she met in the company of the up-and-coming boxer Rocky Graziano. Just before an important boxing match, Arlyne’s parents forcibly removed her from Al’s hotel room. The incident so upset Al that he lost the match. Arlyne blamed herself and compensated him for his lost winnings with money she stole from her father’s wallet. But Al’s mother and brothers disliked Arlyne, and Al came to expect her handouts. Before long Arlyne decided she had had enough of him and her visits to his “wop house.”
Arlyne’s next lover was her father’s friend Nathaniel “Natie” Nelson, a clothing manufacturer with ties to the underworld. Natie was three decades older than Arlyne, a flashy dresser who glittered with jewelry and rivaled Bugsy Siegel in his good looks. Until she seduced him in a beachside cabana, Natie ignored her attempts to attract him.
This quick session on a chaise longue led, at least on Natie’s part, to a passionate love affair. He showered Arlyne with gifts and money. But his increasing possessiveness and talk of marriage so alarmed her that she broke off with him. Natie won her back with a diamond bracelet and by enlisting her grandmother’s support. He also stopped mentioning marriage.
Arlyne dropped out of school to become a clothing showroom model. Often she spent the night in Natie’s lavishly decorated apartment. One Saturday morning she passed Jimmy Doyle, a well-known gangster, in Natie’s building. Then she found Natie dead in the foyer, a bullet hole in his forehead. Horrified, she ran away and said nothing. Jimmy Doyle summoned her to a meeting. Arlyne dressed herself with Virginia Hillish élan and went to meet her death. But Jimmy only wanted sex, quick and raw. Arlyne obliged him. Afterward, Jimmy lit a cigarette and said, “Get the fuck outta here. I’ll call ya.”11
From then on Jimmy used her like a sex slave and shared her with his associates. Arlyne bore this in silence, afraid to confide in her parents. But she lost so much weight and wept so frequently that they sent her to a psychiatrist, who coaxed out her secret and told her parents. Her father went to see Jimmy. In return for his guarantee that Arlyne would never reveal what she knew about Natie Nelson’s death, Jimmy agreed to stop seeing her.
Finally safe, Arlyne recuperated. Soon she met and married Norman Brickman, an attractive older man who had just divorced his wife. In retrospect, Arlyne believes she accepted his proposal just so she could marry before her conservative and successful younger sister. Arlyne’s marriage was unhappy. Norman seemed implacably demanding about his clothes, his food and how his house was kept. Despite her best efforts, Arlyne failed to satisfy him. They separated, and she took their little daughter, Leslie, with her. She began to date and sleep with hoodlums, former friends like Tony Mirra and new ones.
Arlyne had expectations about these relationships. “With a mobster who had class, you would go out with ’em a few times. You’d give ’em a blow job in the car. Maybe they’d buy you a piece of jewelry. Maybe they’d give you a few hundred-dollar bills. ‘Here, go buy yourself a dress.’”12
But her latest man, a big time Mafioso named Joe Colombo, demanded sex and gave her nothing in return. “He’s the worst fuck in the world!” Arlyne confided indignantly to a more generous wiseguy.13
Over time, Arlyne became the trusted moll for all the important crime families: the Gambinos, Genoveses and Bonannos. Her life with these wiseguys was a crashing roller-coaster course of fear (once three wiseguys raped her in a nightclub office) interspersed with large injections of cash.
For years this was how Arlyne existed. Then she met wiseguy Tommy Luca, who despite his anti-Semitism—he publicly referred to her as a “matzoh-grease bastard”—made her his moll, and set her and Leslie up in an apartment. But life with Tommy was distressingly domestic, with Arlyne pressed into service to cook Italian meals for mobsters who ignored her as they discussed their numbers racket. Tommy showered her with jewelry, but whenever he needed money, which happened regularly, he would take back his gifts and pawn them.
Tommy also beat her, often and increasingly more brutally. Once, as she lay bruised on the floor, he raped her. Later, he reproached her for making him do such terrible things and promised her she could always count on him. An archetypal battered woman, Arlyne interpreted his violence as passion and his subsequent remorse as love. She tried her utmost to please him, even fattening herself up and blackening her hair to make herself look more Italian.
The relationship deteriorated as it intensified. Arlyne was so helpful in Tommy’s “business” that she assumed he would be unable to do without her. At the same time, she spied on him for rival mobsters as a sort of misguided insurance policy for herself. When they were both arrested for bookmaking, Tommy ordered her to save him by confessing, because her punishment would be more lenient than his. Arlyne confessed, plea-bargained and received probation and a two-hundred-dollar fine.
The years passed. Arlyne ended up in the clutches of a Mafia moneylender she could not pay. She turned official police informant after learning that her loan shark was planning to kill her. For over a decade, while she ran a book-making operation and also joined Tommy Luca in selling heroin, Arlyne wore wired handbags and taped mob conversations. In 1986, during a long and difficult trial, she testified for the prosecution and essentially broke the back of the Colombo mob’s operation. Then, under federal protection, she left the east coast for a new life in Florida.
From adolescence, Arlyne Weiss Brickman was inspired by Virginia Hill. By any measure, however, Arlyne fell short of Virginia’s achievements. She never enjoyed vast amounts of money or the respect of her mob associates, who were also anti-Semites. Unlike Virginia, who had no children during her active association with the mob, Arlyne subjected her daughter to such a violent home life that Leslie once attacked one of Arlyne’s abusive wiseguys with a butcher knife. When Leslie became addicted to heroin, Arlyne refused to stop dealing in it. On the other hand, Arlyne has remained alive, not entirely dissatisfied with her life. But she is spending her latter years with limited security, little money and no respect. In the end, Virginia Hill proved a false model.
Like Arlyne, Sandy Sadowsky and Georgia Durante were models who dated and ultimately married wiseguys. Sandy, a Las Vegas showgirl in the 1950s, deeply admired Virginia Hill. As an adolescent, she had watched Virginia Hill (on a black-and-white, eight-inch television screen) testify during the Kefauver investigation. “There she was in her low-cut black dress and wide-brimmed black picture hat, in sunglasses with a silver fox jacket draped across her shoulders. Notorious, glamorous, mysterious … I thought she was sensational,” Sandy recalls.15
Both Sandy and Georgia experienced the psychotic life of a mob moll. Their lovers heaped clothes and jewelry on them, then reclaimed it when they ran short of money. Once, as Sandy dined with nightclub owner Bernie Barton, a friend of super-hood Meyer Lansky, a bookmaker joined them. Casually, Bernie handed him a signed paper and his car keys. “You’ve got cash for a cab, right, baby?” he asked Sandy.16 He had just signed over their car to acquit a gambling debt.
Shortfalls of cash are the lot of mob mistresses and wives, and financial security is as tenuous as other aspects of their existence. (Bernie had to obtain his parole officer’s approval before he could marry Sandy.)
Both Sandy and Georgia witnessed instances of the criminal violence that was integral to their partners’ profession. Once Sandy arrived home to find a stranger with a bullet hole in his shoulder, whose blood was drenching her custom-made, trapunto-stitched white bedspread and oozing onto her powder blue carpeting. Bernie ordered Sandy to help him dig out the bullet. Taking the man to the hospital was, he said, out of the question. A shaken Sandy assisted Bernie as he sliced into the shrieking man’s flesh with a kitchen knife and excised the bullet that he then flushed down the toilet. Afterward Bernie calmly ate a toasted bagel with cream cheese, tomato and red onion.
Georgia’s experiences were worse. Handsome, flashy nightclub owner Joe Lamendola, whom she eventually married, was brutal. Georgia watched as he and his associates kicked a man who lay pleading for his life before they shoved him into a car trunk. When Georgia tearfully asked Joe about the incident, he slapped her repeatedly until she agreed that she had seen nothing and would say nothing. “Don’t you ever, ever fucking question me! Who the hell are you to question me?” Joe roared.17
Like Virginia and Arlyne, Sandy and Georgia were victims of repeated beatings. Georgia became a classic battered wife. Sandy was cursed—“Stupid. Bitch. Cunt. Dumb douche bag”—when her sometimes charming lover tried to eat the first meal she prepared for him: charred steak and half-raw baked potato. He slammed the food and plates against the wall, then pounded the table and walls and hurled insults at her.
Both women were dominated and controlled, down to the tiniest aspect of life, including makeup, hairstyle, apparel, friends, activities. Another problem was pregnancy. As Sandy discovered, wiseguys hate their molls to become pregnant. After secretly trying various ways to rid herself of the fetus, including douching with Lysol, Sandy confessed to Bernie. He blamed her for her stupidity and lamented his bad luck in impregnating every woman he slept with. When Sandy defended herself and retorted that she had used the rhythm method, as the Catholics did, Bernie shouted, “Did you ever notice that Catholics have twenty kids apiece?”18
In the 1960s, Canadian Shirley Ryce’s experiences echoed many of Sandy’s and Georgia’s, and by later becoming an informant, Arlyne’s. Unlike these other women, Shirley was already married. A young mother and bored wife, she began her “career” late, at twenty-three. Cruising the bars one night in her hometown of Hamilton, an industrial city outside Toronto, she was strongly attracted to Rocco Papalia, a leader of the Papalia crime family. He had sex with her on their third “date,” at his brother’s apartment. He wanted to keep his own pristine for his fiancée, who often visited.
Sex itself was conservative. Unlike many American mobsters, the Papalias scorned oral sex as kinky and disgusting. When Shirley occasionally took his penis in her mouth, Frank Papalia (Rocco’s older brother, whom Rocco farmed her out to after tiring of her) refused to kiss her afterward because that “was just so terrible” and he felt soiled. He could not even bring himself to eat with a woman who had done such a revolting thing. For these Italian gangsters, Shirley concluded, the sexual revolution had never happened.
They were equally traditional about marriage. Shirley deduced that Rocco had gotten married when she noticed he had gained quite a bit of weight, the consequence of his wife’s cooking. She knew better than to ask any questions about wives, to ask if Rocco (or later, Frankie) loved her or to show jealousy. She had to accept her status as a moll; she had to be pretty, entertaining and—when Rocco asked her—available for sex with various of his associates. At one meeting, Shirley realized she had slept with eight of the nine mobsters in attendance. Rocco joked, “What’s this, a reunion?”19
In return for pleasing and serving the Papalia wiseguys, Shirley received gifts, money and—when she left her husband—a job at the Papalias’ Gold Key Club. As a hostess, she functioned as a moll elder and mentor. She taught young wannabes that the mob liked their molls tastefully garbed, preferably in dresses. They could not use the “f” word in company, though it was permissible one on one. They should aspire to seem refined, drinking liquor instead of beer, wearing classic jewelry rather than gaudy baubles, and never suggest or expect anything but straight sex. “I had to fantasize to make [sex] interesting,” she later recalled. “I never had an orgasm in mob sex; I didn’t know what a climax was while I was with them.”20
Mob mistresses who give interviews or write about their hidden pasts usually acknowledge their essential powerlessness. Shirley Ryce attempts a sort of feminist analysis of her promiscuity, arguing that by doing what powerful men do, she was trying to acquire for herself what she saw as the trappings of power. Georgia now understands that she was a classic victim of the battered woman syndrome—so, of course, were Arlyne and Virginia. Many of these women confuse possessiveness with love, violence with passion, and become trapped in nightmarish relationships, often one after the other.
As a prerequisite to uniting her fortunes with criminal men dedicated to subverting mainstream society, a would-be moll must disregard the law and disrespect social moral standards. She must internalize and abide by the very different values of her underworld associates. It is true that the underworld has certain opportunities less easily available to women in the straight or square world—money and the goods it can buy are at the top of the list, followed by the thrill of danger and violence. But molls pay a high price that includes collapsed self-esteem, destroyed families and ferocious personal insecurity that can endure a lifetime.
Totalitarian governments often assume forms of institutional gangsterism reminiscent of the criminal underworld. This is particularly true when high-ranked officials abuse their power to exert nearly absolute control over women they desire sexually. An egregious example of such a man is Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria, a Georgian peasant who rose through Communist Party ranks to head the Soviet Union’s Ministry of Internal Affairs (1938), the secret police. After purging the police, Beria implemented a regime of terror infamous for torture and the Gulag Archipelago of forced-labor camps.
After Stalin died, Beria was tried and later executed. At one point in his trial, a prosecutor referred to nine lists containing sixty-two women’s names, and asked if they were his mistresses. Yes, Beria replied, most of them. And did he have syphilis? Yes, but he had had it treated. What about the fourteen-year-old schoolgirl he raped, who later had his baby? It was not rape, Beria insisted. The girl had consented to have sex with him.
One of Beria’s mistresses was a young Georgian dentist named Vera. Vera was a solemn woman, tall and slender, with a pale complexion and dark eyes. She practiced her profession in the Lubyanka prison, where she also lived in a small apartment. Beria visited Vera’s apartment whenever he pleased, and he also forced her to be his accomplice in torturing prisoners. A guard would escort the victim to Vera’s office, supposedly for a routine dental examination. But once the man opened his mouth, the guard would pin him to the chair and interrogate him while Vera drilled. Until the agonized prisoner nodded in response to questions and agreed to confess immediately, she continued drilling. One anti-Stalinist author endured only fifteen minutes before he pleaded guilty to every charge against him.22
Unless the never-smiling Vera was as warped as her lover, her relationship with him must have tortured her as much as she tortured Beria’s victims. She may have known at least some of them, perhaps sympathized with their “heresies.” Their screams must have haunted her day and night, and her apartment inside Lubyanka could not have afforded her much comfort. Vera could never escape from Beria or from her own memories.
Lavrenti Beria was one of the worst examples of political gangsterism. Because he enjoyed Stalin’s trust, he was as dangerous as he was powerful, and he exercised his power to subjugate any woman he desired. He suborned the apparatus of state created with such fervor and after so much bloodshed to guarantee the rights of all citizens and the equality of women; he used it as an instrument to procure women for his personal sexual gratification. Stalinism, which Beria personified, betrayed the gender equality at the ideological core of communist ideals and with it, legions of principled and once hopeful women.
Nearly two decades later and continents away, Cuban president Fidel Castro implemented a purer form of communism, though early Castroism borrowed Stalinist strategies: neighborhood cadres operating as nationwide spy organisms; students encouraged to inform on heretical parents and teachers; homosexuals targeted for abuse. Human rights were crushed. Anti-Castroites, suspected and real, were subjected to torture and lengthy terms of imprisonment. These loathsome measures sullied Castroism’s achievements in the realm of racial and gender equality, housing, education, medicine and social welfare.
The Cuba that Castro liberated from military dictator–president Fulgencio Batista24 was notoriously corrupt and repressive and had happily coexisted with the small, spoiled elite class of Cubans who set Cuba’s social tone. Batista had also invited American gangsters to set up gambling shops in Havana. Meyer Lansky and other Mafia leaders established such spectacular casinos and nightclubs that Cuban nightlife won an international reputation for its exuberance, vitality and hedonism. Cuba’s rum was smooth, its tobacco mellow and its dancers dynamic. Its prostitutes, disgorged from the surging underclass of desperate peasants, were sultry and young. Most of Cuba’s other employed women—9.8 percent of total workers registered—were domestics or beggars. Otherwise women worked at home as unpaid homemakers or undocumented part-time entrepreneurs.
Castroism has taken great strides in improving this situation because of the egalitarianism at its ideological core, and because Castro personally respects and often trusts women. In 1974, he attended every session of a five-day national women’s congress.25 A year later, on Women’s Day, his government adopted the Family Code that outlawed the occupations of female prostitute and domestic, and made all Cuban citizens, male and female, equal in the eyes of the law.26
In social terms, Castro is still traditional both in his judgments and in his expectations of women. In his own marriage to Mirta Díaz-Balart, Castro demanded almost feudal loyalty but did not hesitate to sacrifice family life for revolutionary activities. He believes in stable marriages and he condones divorce. Yet since his own divorce from Mirta, he has preferred to take mistresses instead of remarrying.
For the women he has been deeply involved with, to love Castro the man is to love Castro the great leader. From his earliest revolutionary days, he has merged his political and personal life. His best-known mistress, Naty Revuelta, learned this slowly and painfully, after she was already nursing the baby she had hoped would permanently ensnare its father.
Natalia Revuelta Clews was born in 1925, four months before Fidel Castro. Her mother, Natica, was descended from a distinguished and wealthy family with British antecedents. With the confidence of beauty reinforced by desire, Natica defied her father and married the handsome but alcoholic Manolo Revuelta. When Naty was four, her parents divorced. Her father moved to far-off Oriente province and removed himself almost entirely from his daughter’s life.
Naty, auburn-haired and tanned, green-eyed and voluptuous, was an even greater beauty than her proud mother. Her education included a Philadelphia prep school and Havana’s finest American school. All her acquaintances expected Naty to achieve great social success. “She has more than beauty, she has It,” her school yearbook avowed.
Naty’s marriage to the respected and much older cardiologist Orlando Fernández Ferrer, who had been smitten when Naty was hospitalized for a dangerously ruptured and gangrenous appendix, was eminently suitable. So was motherhood, which followed a year later with little Natalie, known as Nina.
But despite industrious servants who cared for her gracious house and adorable daughter, despite the exclusive Vedado Tennis Club, the fine shops of Havana and even her interesting job at Esso Standard Oil, Naty was dissatisfied.
This was not just because her hardworking and reserved husband bored her. Unaccountably, this favored daughter of Cuba’s aristocracy had developed revolutionary sympathies. In 1952, when General Fulgencio Batista overturned the government, squashed upcoming elections and was rewarded with recognition by the United States, Naty risked the ire of her peers and her family by casting her lot with revolutionary students dedicated to defeating Batista.
Naty was serious and determined. When Castro’s struggling movement needed money, she contributed her savings. She joined the League of Women Followers of José Martí, sewing look-alike military costumes Castro needed to disguise his men. Daringly, Naty duplicated the key to her house and sent copies to two opposition politicians and a third, secreted in a linen envelope perfumed with Lanvin’s Arpege, to Castro.
The key to Naty’s house unlocked her heart as well. Quite some time after he received this token from his spirited, socialite supporter, Castro appeared at her door in a clean and starched guayabera. They talked, or rather Castro did, even after Orlando arrived home. Castro spoke so movingly about his opposition to passive resistance that Orlando emptied his pockets and donated his day’s earnings. Naty walked Castro to the door. “If you need me, please count on me,” she said earnestly.27 Naty was unaware, her then unborn daughter Alina wrote later, “that her face, her slender waist, and her high-society status made men’s hearts beat faster… . [She and Fidel] connected immediately, and the rest of the world ceased to exist.”28
Already Naty was in love and, after his fashion, so was Castro. Naty’s husband was devoted and kind, but he was also unexciting, workaholic and oblivious to his energetic wife’s ennui. And no matter how Naty must have tried to avoid comparing him to the tall, handsome and charismatic Castro, Orlando was irredeemably short and eggheaded.
Outwardly, Naty and Fidel assumed the mien of political collaborators. He declined her invitation to the Vedado social club but she accepted his to a protest rally. Responding to the students’ frenzy, he navigated his way to the platform and took command. As he fought his way through the crowd, he gripped Naty’s hand in his and pulled her after him. It did not matter that she crept in very late that night. Orlando was still at work, and Nina’s nanny had lulled the girl into peaceful sleep.
Soon Castro was using Naty’s gift of her house key almost daily, transforming her home into his strategic headquarters for planning the assault on the Moncada garrison. Before he left, he told Naty that leaving her was difficult. “I want you to know that I am placing you on an altar inside my heart,” he said.29
At dawn on the day planned for the attack, Naty distributed Fidel’s manifestos to politicos, journalists and publishers. But the radio broadcast the dreadful news that Castro’s ragtag army had been defeated. Castro himself had fled to the hills, but half his men were taken prisoner, tortured and executed. Naty was in torment. She dared say nothing, however, and could not protest when Orlando suggested lunch at the Biltmore Country Club and, afterward, the beach.
Fidel was captured and imprisoned. As the only person besides the movement’s leaders to have had advance information about the Moncada attack, Naty was so seriously implicated that she feared that at any minute she, too, might be arrested. Her mother, in whom she had confided, was so anxious that her thick hair began to thin. But nobody, certainly not Fidel, exposed Naty’s complicity, and she remained free to live if not enjoy her pleasant life.
Fidel was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. For Naty, the twenty months he actually served would be the golden era when his bars kept others away from him. For the first and last time, Fidel was dependent on and unreservedly in love with her.
Naty’s new mission was to furnish Fidel with everything he wanted, to make herself indispensable to him and, she hoped, to bind him to her forever. She located and mailed him boxes of books and the foodstuffs he craved. Fidel devoured everything and praised her for her bounty and her intellectual range and depth. As their letters deepened into intimacy and then love, the bored and beautiful housewife vibrated with purpose and rejoiced in the relationship. “Your letters to me provide nourishment for my soul … help me to know my feelings … and to calm my fears,” she confided.30
Fidel, as indefatigable as he was brilliant, proposed a joint study project of the world’s best literature. Together they read, discussed and analyzed everything from Thackeray’s Vanity Fair to Das Kapital to Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge. “You have a space on every page, in every phrase, in every word,” Fidel enthused. “I want to share with you every pleasure that I find in a book. Doesn’t this mean that you are my intimate companion and that I am never alone?”31 And “the part of you which belongs to me accompanies me always, and it will be so forever.”32 He began to sign his letters, “I love you very much.”
As their exchange of letters continued, Fidel attributed to Naty a soaring intellectuality and originality, to which she responded with all her heart. But when she discovered that she was not Fidel’s only correspondent, her pen (actually her Smith Corona at the Esso office) dripped poisonous jealousy. “I do not know how to love when I am not loved,” she raged. “Who else in the world knows me better than you? Since I started writing, I don’t keep any secrets. My soul is open to you.”33
The more their epistolary passion intensified, the more Naty loathed her duplicitous life. She justified it, however. Her heart was large enough, she declared, to love Fidel, Orlando, Nina and even her difficult, reactionary mother. Fidel needed no such rationalizations. He wrote dutiful letters to his devoted but apolitical wife, Mirta Díaz-Balart, who was struggling to raise young Fidelito alone, without any financial support from her incarcerated husband. From afar, Fidel dictated his son’s dietary regime and other domestic details, and kept Mirta updated about his version of Cuban politics. He did not share with Naty (or probably feel) any sense of ambivalence much less guilt about their relationship, and he mentioned Mirta only in passing. When Mirta and his sister Lidia quarreled, for instance, Fidel confided to Naty that he intended to reproach his judges for sentencing him to only fifteen years instead of the serenity of twenty.
Never once did Naty feel threatened by Mirta. In fact, her existence, like Fidel’s incarceration, kept him safe from potential rivals unencumbered with husbands and children. Naty went out of her way to communicate with and visit Mirta, then wrote to Fidel about how sweet his wife was. Naty also ingratiated herself with Fidel’s mother and brother, Raúl.
Less than a year into their paper-strewn passion, a prison official inadvertently or maliciously switched Fidel’s letters, sending Naty’s to Mirta and Mirta’s to Naty. Naty simply forwarded the missive back to Fidel, but Mirta, outraged and wounded, opened Naty’s and discovered that the husband who had already caused her such distress was in love with another woman.34
Mirta went after Naty furiously, warning her that she would create a scandal for Fidel if Naty persisted in communicating with him. At first, Naty was incapable of grasping the danger to either herself or Fidel, and instructed him to assuage Mirta’s fears and pain. “Don’t worry, everything in life has a solution,” she wrote.35
Fidel’s solution was to cease writing to her. Personal matters were of little interest to him, he reminded her. Naty, consumed with love for him, found it difficult to identify herself as a “personal matter.” Nor did she understand that in expressing his gratitude for all she had done for him, Fidel was extinguishing their burning love.
But Fidel still needed books and, through his sister Lidia, sent Naty wish lists in impersonal, uncompromising letters. The marital scandal he hoped to avert erupted anyway, but not because of Naty. On July 17, 1954, he heard on the radio that the Interior Ministry had laid Mirta off. This was the first indication that Fidel had had that his wife was working for the despised Batista government. He reacted with furious disbelief. The news report was “a machination against me, the worst, the most cowardly, the most indecent, the vilest and intolerable,” he wrote to a friend. “The prestige of my wife and my honor as a revolutionary are at stake.”36
His sister Lidia soon confirmed that the report was true. Days later, the long-suffering Mirta asked for a divorce. Fidel countered by asking for one too. “You know I have a steel heart and I shall be dignified until the last day of my life,” he assured Lidia.37 Mirta, equally dignified, remarried and left Cuba forever, except for annual visits to Fidelito, whose custody she and Fidel contested bitterly until he finally won it.
Naty, meanwhile, waited tensely for Fidel’s release from prison in a general amnesty. “Probably Fidel wasn’t even aware yet that Naty’s attraction for him depended upon her being a conduit, a courier for him—granted, an exciting, desirable one. Fidel was using her to get the books he wanted; that’s what remained of his passion,” writes Wendy Gimbel, who spent considerable time with Naty as she researched Havana Dreams, her book about the four generations of Naty’s family.
Before dawn on the morning of his release, Naty sneaked out of the house in a cinch-waisted red skirt and white peasant blouse, and got into Orlando’s green Mercedes-Benz. But the triumphant Fidel, surrounded by his sisters, scarcely noticed her among the throng of adoring admirers.
Before their final rupture, Naty and Fidel had several surreptitious meetings in his cramped apartment and consummated sexually the passion that, for Fidel, had ended back in prison. Naty must have hoped that sex, her sensuous beauty and their remembered love would reclaim him, but Fidel remained courteous and emotionally distant. Almost immediately, Naty became pregnant with his child.
With her own particular version of the age-old fancy that a baby might solidify a disintegrating relationship, Naty dreamed of the son she carried, a little Fidel who would survive although the upcoming revolution might kill his father. Fidel, recently exiled, invited her to join and marry him in Mexico, where he was surviving on eighty US dollars monthly. Naty’s instincts for self-preservation saved her. She stayed with her safe doctor husband and their daughter.
However, Naty’s relations with her husband had changed quite radically. In a fit of conscience and bravado, she had confessed to him that she loved Fidel. She even tried to be faithful to Fidel by refusing to sleep with Orlando. “Once I had a sexual connection to Fidel, I had no alternative but to retreat from my husband,” she told Wendy Gimbel.38 Orlando reacted calmly and did not suggest separating; perhaps he believed Naty was confusing Fidel with his political dreams, so the man and his mission were indistinguishable. On March 19, 1956, Naty delivered the infant daughter she had hoped would be a replica Fidel. Without hesitation, Orlando gave baby Alina his surname.
Naty sent Fidel a sliver of ribbon from Alina’s christening gown, and over in Mexico, the new father toasted his daughter. Later, he sent his sister Lidia to inspect Alina and verify her paternity. Lidia examined the baby carefully. “This baby girl is definitely a Castro,”39 she announced. Then she distributed Fidel’s gifts: embossed silver hoop earrings and bracelet for Naty, and platinum-stud pearl earrings with tiny diamonds for Alina, who later lost this rare gift from her father.
Fidel wrote erratically to enlist Naty’s help in reinvigorating his revolutionary movement. He did not pretend that he loved her, and Naty was aware of rumors that he was in love with a young woman named Isabel Custodio. On December 2, 1956, undetected by Batista’s patrols, Castro and fifty committed Cubans landed in Oriente province and hunkered in for two years of guerrilla warfare. During this period, Castro shared his life and bed with Celia Sanchez, who dedicated her life to him and his revolution. Naty (who then knew nothing about Celia) continued to furnish Fidel with goodies: money and his favorite French pastries from Havana’s famous La Casa Potín. Occasionally, he reciprocated with gifts of spent .75-caliber gun shells.
When Alina was almost three years old, Batista packed his bags and fled. Fidel returned to Havana, a conquering hero in olive green army fatigues with a cigar clamped between his teeth. “Fidel! Fidel! Viva Fidel!” shouted the throngs who lined the streets to cheer him on. Among them was Naty Revuelta, who managed to hand him a white flower as he passed by. “I’ll send for you tomorrow,” he told her. She was not surprised that he did not.
Other Cubans were. Castro’s interpreter Juan Arcocha reminisced about Naty to American journalist and author Georgie Anne Geyer. “Fidel had loved her desperately,” Arcocha said, “and on January 1, she was ripe for him…. She expected to be married to him. She was magnificent, more beautiful than ever. Everybody was saying Fidel would marry her.”40 But Fidel had long ago ceased to love Naty; in any case, he was already married to his revolution.
By 1959, Castro’s name was on all Cuban lips, a curse to those facing nationalization and an end to privilege, a benediction to the multitudes glimpsing liberation. Naty, one of the rare members of elite society who continued to support Fidel’s revolution, confessed to Orlando that Alina was Fidel’s daughter, not his, and requested a legal separation.
For Orlando, this terrible blow followed on the heels of the revolutionary government’s nationalization of his clinic. Bereft of wife and clinic, Orlando quietly joined the exodus of professional Cubans. He took Nina with him, leaving Alina with Naty. Naty had agreed to let Nina go on the understanding that she would return to Cuba within a year. For the first time, Orlando betrayed his wife. He had never intended to surrender his daughter. Nina remained with him in the United States and did not see her mother again for two decades.
On a few occasions afterward, Naty and Fidel met together privately. Alina recalls her mother returning from these trysts “all aglow with a smile coming from within and her eyes lost in mystery.”41 A few times Naty swallowed her pride, armed herself with the weapons of seduction—flattering hairstyle, striking clothes, gentle reminders of past promises—and lined up for an audience with Cuba’s premier citizen in his office on the twenty-third floor of the Havana Hilton. When her turn came, Fidel, often clad in striped pajamas, received her with unconcealed indifference, impervious to her attractions, eager to see her go.
Fidel had no interest in Naty other than as Alina’s mother. Sometimes he visited his daughter in the dead of night. “She looks like a curly little lamb,” he exclaimed once, before giving Alina a baby doll in his own image, bearded and dressed in military fatigues. While Naty watched, Fidel crawled on the floor to play with his child, who remembers that when he put out his cigar, he had a “manly smell” and wore no cologne.
Suddenly, without warning, Fidel stopped coming, probably unnerved or irritated by having to confront the hopelessly adoring Naty. He also refused to give Alina his name—she was, he pointed out, Orlando’s legal daughter.
Naty the ex-mistress finally faced the fact that Fidel no longer loved her. As if that were not enough, she lost her job with Esso, which shut down its Cuban operation. Orlando had left her and taken Nina. Without love, family or work, Naty lost thirty-five pounds and withdrew into mourning.
She revived in a proletarianized Cuba whose citizens achieved instant equality through shared privation. Electricity was erratic. Water service was problematic. Staple foods disappeared. Ration books dictated pitifully limited diets, and Naty patriotically refused to resort to the black market. Naty’s cook, preparing monotonous meals of unsalted lentils or pureed spinach, lamented, “I don’t know how to cook without food.”42 (At one point, on a rare visit, Fidel noticed how debilitated Alina had become. He scolded Naty for neglecting her and sent over a can of fresh milk.)
But Naty, who had flung herself into the revolutionary fervor, was too busy for domestic matters. Too late—in refusing to join Fidel in Mexico, she had lost her last chance with him—she decided to embrace whatever austerities the revolution required. She discarded her extensive and fashionable wardrobe for outfits of blue-green army fatigues and a Spanish beret. In one photo, she poses proudly in a field, with rolled-up sleeves and the top buttons of her shirt fetchingly undone. Her lush hair is tied back under her beret, and in her hands she holds a rifle with graceful fingers, much as one might hold a violin.
Naty also decided that the house she shared with her mother and daughter was unconscionably luxurious, and in Alina’s words, “she gave it [fully furnished] to the Revolution.”43 A confused and bitter Natica, who despised Fidel and his revolution, salvaged crystal, bone china and silver remnants of the “good old life” and carted them over to their new lodgings, an apartment by the sea. There, Alina remembers, their maid would place bone china plates and silver bowls on the table. Then, while Naty “gobbled up” the corn-meal mush or other unappetizing fare, Natica instructed Alina on the niceties of elegant dining and made snide remarks about the catastrophe of Castro’s Cuba.
According to Alina, the stint in the small apartment was of short duration. Fidel arranged for much finer lodgings and a servant to help Tata, their housekeeper. There was also a garage for the Mercedes-Benz Naty was still driving.
By 1964, because (Wendy Gimbel believes) Fidel longed to be relieved of his irksome ex-mistress and their daughter, he assigned Naty to the Cuban Embassy in Paris, where she was to study the French chemical industry. “This is Celia’s doing,” Naty said grimly.”44
Celia Sanchez was as fervent and knowledgeable a revolutionary as Fidel and, since the planning stages of his invasion from Mexico, had become an invaluable member of his command team. During the long and onerous campaign up in the Sierra, Celia had shared his bed. Back in Havana, she was his indispensable guardian, assistant and adviser. On more than one occasion, she had barred Naty from seeing Fidel, likely on his own instructions. Naty, however, preferred to attribute Celia’s actions to jealousy.
Alina is venomous in describing the woman she believed was keeping her from her father. To her mind, Celia was as ridiculous as she was hideous. Her “unruly” hair was scrunched into a ponytail worn to one side of her “egregious” head, her lacy slip always trailed beneath her dress and “for the finishing touches to her skinny legs, she wore a pair of bobby sox with stiletto heels.”45 Alina—and perhaps Naty?—must have wondered how this unfashionable and homely woman had beaten out the lovely Naty.
Exiled—as she saw it—to Paris, Naty plunged into her whirlwind new life, which included the Mercedes-Benz she had had shipped from Havana. She worked at the embassy and attempted to produce the report Castro had assigned her though she knew nothing about chemical industries. To free up time for the project, and also for an intensifying social life, Naty sent the resentful Alina to a school and pension ten miles outside Paris.
When rumors began to percolate that she was planning to defect, Naty squelched them by sending Alina, her hostage to fortune, back to Cuba. The night Alina arrived, Fidel came to collect the gifts (a suitcase of French cheese, single-malt whiskey) Naty had sent for him, and to visit Alina.
Five months later, Naty returned to Havana. Fidel waited eight months to drop by to greet her. When he did, she subjected him to a litany of complaints, including her lack of employment—nobody would hire her without Fidel’s approval. The next day Fidel appointed her chief of documentation and information at the National Center for Scientific Investigations.
Naty also finally revealed to Alina that Fidel, not the long-fled Orlando Fernández, was her father. She then showed Alina her precious letters from Fidel’s Isle of Pines prison, letters he had urged her to keep as important documents of the revolution, and that documented, as well, the flowering of their love affair. Naty explained that the name “Alina” derived from “Lina,” Fidel’s mother’s name. She justified not acting on Fidel’s suggestion that she join him in Mexico: she could not leave Nina, and in any case he had been in no position to take on a woman and newborn baby.
At last Alina knew what was already common knowledge in Havana, that Fidel Castro was her father. But he still did not answer her many letters. “I could not distract him … and get him to come back to my mother,” Alina recalls.46 In the next two years, he summoned her only twice, but mentioned that her name would be changed to Castro when a certain law was changed. He added, referring to Naty, “Your mom has a problem. She is much too good. Don’t be that good to any man.”47
Naty’s reduced status with Fidel was reinforced time and again. Alina—and Naty?—put the blame squarely on Celia Sanchez. According to Alina, Celia harassed Naty and blocked her way for the rest of her lifetime. (Celia died in 1980.) As for the Castros, they had been more respectful of Naty as Fidel’s “whore” than they were now that she was merely his ex-mistress.
The teenaged Alina was as beautiful as her mother, as vituperative as her version of Celia, as stubborn as her father and as uncooperative and neurotic as a neglected child can be. From the age of seventeen, Alina married and divorced several times. “In terms of marriage, I’m an annual, not a perennial,” she liked to quip.48
At first Fidel promised to be a better father if she abandoned this madness. Afterward, he was just disgusted. “I can’t believe that you have left an Angolan war hero for a ballet dancer!” he reproached her after divorce number one and before marriage number two. “If he is a dancer, he must be queer.”49
Naty was no happier about Alina’s tumultuous love life than Fidel. When Alina announced that she was pregnant, Naty kicked her out. Motherhood in undersupplied, overregulated Cuba was hellish. Fidel’s gift was an outfit for Mumin, Alina’s infant daughter, a housecoat for Alina, talcum powder and money for a refrigerator. Alina used every expedient to get enough food, including demanding vegetables from an old man who fondled her breasts. When she married a wealthy Mexican who could have provided a better life for her, Fidel denied her an exit permit. After a while the Mexican simply withdrew from Alina’s confined and frozen life.
Alina moved back in with Naty and Natica, who (like Naty and Alina) quarreled constantly. Natica was an unrepentant anti-Castroite who vigorously defended her elitist values, including her hardcore racism. As time passed, Alina acted more outrageously. She criticized her father’s regime to foreign journalists. She became a bulimic fashion model. She lashed out at family and friends, spewing her lifetime’s anger. Though she could not make her father love her, she knew that because of her status, nothing would ever happen to her. When she was forty, Alina fled Cuba, denounced Castro from abroad, sold the letters he had written to her mother and wrote her memoirs about life as his daughter.
Naty endured, indeed clung to, the same gilded prison from which Alina had absconded. Because Castro had once loved her, trusted her with crucial secrets and impregnated her—and because her (now fading) beauty was legendary and her daughter notorious—Naty lived unlike other Cubans. On the one hand, she enjoyed the luxury of a splendid home and a series of decent jobs. On the other, she suffered the indignities that vengeful colleagues heaped on her; the pain of Fidel’s refusal to respond to her letters; the fear that Celia was plotting against her; the grinding reality of Cuba’s unrelenting shortages; and the daily torment of life with Natica, who despised everything she believed in and bitterly taunted Naty for every privation and inconvenience the household of wrangling women faced.
Fidel Castro’s special relationship with women is as well known as his energetic womanizing. Because he trusts and relies on them, women have played a remarkably important role in his revolutionary struggles. He admires beauty, but it affects him only temporarily. What he values above all else is the intellect, as Castro political intimate Melba Fernandez told New York Times correspondent Tad Szulc.
Szulc considers Naty Revuelta as one in “an extraordinary contingent of beautiful and/or highly intelligent women who, in effect, dedicated their lives to him and his cause—and without whom he might not have succeeded.”50 Naty voluntarily joined their ranks and remained there, driven by revolutionary conviction but also a forlorn, lingering hope that somehow she might recapture Fidel’s heart or at least revive some of the brief passion they had shared.
Ultimately, Naty’s story is more remarkable for her tenacity and sacrifice than for the nature of her relationship with Fidel Castro. He loved her exclusively for only months, from the bowels of solitary confinement, the only time she had no rivals and could employ her ample resources to comfort and impress her suffering lover. In the flesh, in freedom, she was truly his mistress for only two months, an unfaithful wife who sneaked off to clandestine rendezvous and sexual trysts that were her last chance to capture the increasingly elusive Fidel. “I was born just to improve my mother’s position with Fidel,” Alina has said repeatedly.51
And fleetingly, this might have worked, except that Naty was not prepared to accept Fidel as he was, impoverished, frenetically bound up in revolution, a man who permitted himself almost no private life and was surrounded by adoring and committed revolutionary women.
Celia Sanchez Manduley succeeded where her predecessor failed and, until her death in 1980, was the most important person in Castro’s life. Celia, born in 1927, one of the five daughters of Dr. Manuel Sanchez Silveira, lived in the southwest of Oriente province where she had long been politically active.
From the first, Celia stood out from other educated and privileged women who offered their services to the movement. She was fiercely intelligent and efficient, focused and disciplined. She was in complete sympathy with the movement’s philosophy and its concrete political goals. She also had extensive knowledge of Oriente province, its political structure and personalities and its topography and people. As Castro and his colleagues planned their invasion, Celia became one of their principal strategists. She provided navigational maps, organized a revolutionary peasant underground and urban support groups, and amassed and delivered supplies, from food to arms, for the rebels. By the time Celia and Fidel met in person, she was already a key member of his operation.
Celia first laid eyes on Fidel on February 16, 1957, in a pasture in guerrilla terrain. He was bearded and filthy, clad in tattered clothes and a green cap, and he probably reeked from months of scrabbling in the Sierra. After walking all night through the Sierra to reach the rebels, Celia and her companion encountered Fidel and his men just after 5 A.M. They talked there for hours, briefing each other on developments and planning the next stages of their uprising. At noon they ate in a nearby sugarcane field, then continued their discussions until late into the night.
Celia was in most ways Fidel’s ideal woman. Up there in the Sierra, with her brilliant grasp of strategy, her expertise with weapons, her ability to transform people into allies and to supply desperately needed food, bullets and anything else Castro needed—a dentist for his aching teeth, a New York Times correspondent to document his progress—she was the answer to his prayers.
Celia’s only flaw was that she lacked the beauty Fidel so admired in other women. Unlike lovely and serious Mirta, sultry and voluptuous Naty or beautiful young Isabel Custodio, whom he had briefly loved in Mexico, Celia could look quite plain. She had a prominent, aquiline nose, a long face, olive skin and springy dark hair she sometimes wore upswept but more often scraped back from her face into a ponytail. Her torso was gaunt, her legs skinny, and she had none of the soft curves for which Naty Revuelta was renowned. At thirty, she was not even very young.52 But she had a ready smile and a husky, throbbing voice. Best of all, she could listen as well as speak. Alina Fernández’s description of Celia’s sartorial style is accurate if venomous, but Celia added simple decorations to her no-nonsense garb. Photos show her with studs or dangling earrings. In the Sierra, in the heartland of military insurrection, she wore guerrilla green shirt and pants but always slipped a gold ankle chain over her boots.53
From their first encounter, Celia and Fidel were soul mates. Celia came and went, bearing information and goods, receiving instructions and lists. When they were apart, she and Fidel kept in close touch by letter, and their correspondence is a vital record not just of their easy and intimate relationship, but also of the military campaign that soon liberated Cuba from the corrupt and repressive Batista.
As this campaign proceeded, the authorities became aware of Celia’s activities. When she learned that they wanted to arrest her, she fled up to the rebel camp. Celia and Fidel became inseparable. She moved into Fidel’s small and camouflaged wooden house–cum–command post. She shared his bedroom and bed. She took over the other small room for her office while Fidel conducted business on the deck. The couple never stopped working, endlessly talking and planning. By the time Batista fell, the rebels in the Sierra had established primitive hospitals, workshops that produced light arms, bullets and leather equipment, a printing press and an all-important radio station.
On the rare occasions Celia had to leave to oversee events elsewhere, Fidel missed her deeply. “Your absence has left a real vacuum. Even when a woman goes around the mountains with a rifle in hand, she always makes our men tidier, more decent, gentlemanly—and even braver.” More personally, “And you, why don’t you make a short trip here? Think about it, and do so in the next few days… . A big hug.” After an erroneous report that Celia had been arrested, Fidel drafted a statement that she and another rebel were “our basic pillars. If you and he are well, all goes well and we are tranquil.” Che Guevara credited Celia with being the rebels’ “only known and safe contact.”54
What Celia did not inspire were the romantic (and sometimes jealous) flourishes and yearnings that permeate Fidel’s letters to Naty Revuelta. And, intelligent and perceptive as she was, Celia must have guessed that her time with Fidel in the Sierra would not be easily repeated. Years later, reminiscing with Fidel and some American journalists, Celia recalled those extraordinary days. “Ah, but those were the best times, weren’t they? We were all so very happy then. Really. We will never be so happy again, will we? Never.”55
In January 1959, Celia’s improbably idyllic life in the Sierra Maestra ended when the revolutionaries took over the cities and the battered Batista regime collapsed. Now all Cuba claimed Fidel. During his triumphant march into Havana, Naty Revuelta waited in the crowd and so did legions of other cheering women, any number of whom envied the special relationship with Fidel that Celia had carved out for herself.
Celia must have known she could not compete for Fidel’s heart, or expect marriage or even fidelity. In the different reality of revolutionary Havana, she would have to reinvent her way of life. She would carve out a relationship with Fidel that would unite them always, so when other women intervened, as they inevitably would, they could never challenge that part of Fidel’s life that Celia had staked out for herself.
Celia must have devised her strategy with the calm efficiency and attention to detail that characterized her work during the revolution. In broad outline, she would make herself as indispensable to Fidel as she had been in the Sierra Maestra. It helped that she loved the revolution as much as he did.
From the beginning, Celia established her dominance. She controlled Castro’s first headquarters, on the top three penthouse floors of the former Havana Hilton Hotel, where he kept an apartment and offices. Later, her cramped and dingy apartment on Eleventh Street in the residential district of Vedado became his central sphere of operations. Celia was his most trusted assistant and adviser, an indefatigable worker who even prepared his meals in her tiny kitchen and had them delivered to him wherever he might be.
Fidel relied on Celia in every dimension of his existence. She alone could criticize him to his face, pointing out errors and suggesting corrections. To the rest of the world, however, she maintained that “Fidel is always right.”56
Celia’s role as Fidel’s confidante and right hand made her Cuba’s unofficial “First Lady.” She also held powerful official positions and, by the time she died, was a ministerial member of the Council of State and a member of the Communist Party’s Central Committee. Her purview extended far and wide, even—as Naty Revuelta discovered—to historic sites and to an oral history of the revolution. Celia designed Lenin Park, a magnificent public park and recreation area. She was passionately interested in environmental issues.
Celia was far too intelligent and capable a woman to sacrifice herself for love. She devoted her life to Fidel because revolutionary principles flowed in her blood as in his. Long before she met him, she had committed herself to the politics of social justice. She believed in Fidel as fervently as he believed in himself: with him, because of him, Cuba would be transformed into utopia.
Celia’s hand stretched far and often softened what it touched. In the Sierra, she counseled mercy when every rebel instinct was to avenge young collaborators tortured and killed by Batista’s brutal forces. But when Fidel replaced Batista and indulged in his own atrocities, Celia’s moderating influence did not seem to have survived the descent from the mountains.
The years passed. Celia was untouchable, and even the most lovestruck woman could not depose or replace her. But still she had to deal with Castro’s many women, some mistresses, others soon-forgotten infatuations. In Georgie Anne Geyer’s dramatic description, Fidel had “a river of devoted and devouring women … flowing like quicksilver through his life… . even, in a new revolutionary variation on the old seigniorial tradition, eager to be deflowered by him; meanwhile, Celia stood guard as valiantly as she could, shouting at pretty Cubanas and shooing them out of Castro’s bed and bedroom.”57
Marita Lorenz was only seventeen when she caught Castro’s eye. At his invitation, the striking German girl came to live with him in a room near his in the Havana Libre Hotel. For quite a long time she was a fixture on Castro’s arm, but finally left Cuba for the United States, where she tried to hawk her memoirs.
Typically, Castro sent birthday flowers to his current favorites and, as a special touch, surprised their mothers with a gift of paella and lobster, extraordinary foodstuffs in food-rationed Cuba. The person in charge of having these goodies delivered? Celia Sanchez, who even in the domain of Fidel’s women made her presence felt.
One of Castro’s mistresses coexisted with Celia until the latter’s death. This was Delia Soto del Valle Jorge, with whom Castro fathered six sons. Castro kept her “on the side,” and Delia never achieved any official status other than her reputation as Fidel’s mistress.
Celia, who shared and shaped his life more than any other woman, though she bore him no children, whose greatest happiness had been when she and Fidel lived cheek by jowl in the Sierra Maestra, died of lung cancer on January 11, 1980. Fidel honored her in death as he had in life, commissioning commemorative statues and ensuring that she would live forever in Cuban legend.
Celia Sanchez, who never married, united herself in what many have called “a historic friendship” with the man she loved, admired, respected and trusted more than any other. Celia wanted Fidel, and knew on what terms she could permanently have him. She was prepared to accept his inability to desire her erotically or to deny himself other, more appealing women. In return, she demanded—and received—a permanent and powerful place at the center of Cuban government, public acknowledgment, respect and a lifetime at Fidel’s side. Unlike his other mistresses and ex-mistresses, Celia had no worries about longevity of tenure or disgrace. She had loved Fidel and taken his measure, then tailored her own needs and demands to accommodate him and to satisfy herself.